Decisions, Decisions

by Susanna Bellini

Are you someone who has difficulty with even the smallest decisions? Maybe your problem lies in the way you are thinking about it. Some simple suggestions drawn from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) will help you change your perspective and make decision-making a clearer and easier process for you.

When you think about a decision you are having difficulty with, how do you describe it? Is it something you have to / want to / must / should / ought to / can do / can’t do / will do? These ‘modal operators’ affect the way you feel about the subject and hide information such as who you are doing this for, what hidden rules and assumptions you are operating on and how important this decision is.

Find out the effect of these modal operators on your decision-making by taking a current decision using each to describe it in turn – eg. I want to do this, I have to do this, I will do this… etc. You’ll soon find out which ones you’ll definitely do, which give you a bad feeling and which give you a good feeling. Now you know, you can use the words that motivate you to make a good decision and take action on it.

You’ll help yourself when you challenge the un-stated assumptions behind your words. If you want to make a decision, but ‘can’t’ – what stops you? If you ‘should’ decide, you could ask yourself, according to whom? What is pressuring you and is this time pressure necessary?

Problems: You can’t make up your mind / You make decisions, but you keep changing your mind, or you don’t stick to them.

Solutions:

Ask yourself these questions and you’ll find it much easier to make good decisions, follow them up with action and feel happy about them:

• What do I want from this decision? What do I not want?
• Who am I making it for? (Who gains and who loses?)
• How important is this decision? (time/situation – do I have to make a decision now / does it matter which decision I make?)
• What will this do for me? What will this not do for me?
• What rules and assumptions am I operating by and do I still want to keep them?

Sometimes you can make your decision-making easier by moving up a level or down a level of detail (‘Chunking up and chunking down’ in NLP terms)

Asking yourself ‘What will this do for me or get me?’ will uncover your higher values and then you can always move back down into detail, by asking how else you can satisfy those aims. Being more or less specific can make your decisions easier for you.

Find out what drives your decisions by asking yourself which of the following you value more - be honest with yourself:

Do you prefer:

• Excitement or security?
• Positive benefits or avoiding negative consequences?
• Taking positive action, or responding to life as it happens?
• Do you motivate yourself or does your motivation come from outside (eg your boss)?
• Do you like things to stay the same or prefer change and variety?
• Do you aim to please others or to please yourself?

Once you are aware of your own priorities, you can always reassess them, if you wish and then, when you are happy with them, use them to make better decisions in the future.

You can also ‘future pace’ your decisions, i.e. consider their impact over time. How will you feel in six months / a year / five years if you do this and if you don’t do this? How would your decision impact on all areas of your life?

Problem : You can’t decide between two or more choices?

Solution :

• Step A List the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ for each option (include short-term and long-term)
• Step B Assign values to these positives and negatives
• Step C Still can’t decide? Look at where you can maximise the positives and reduce the negatives.

Here’s a simplified example:

Which job should I go for?

Job A		Job B
+	-	-	+
Higher salary	Longer distance to work	Lower salary	Shorter distance to work

Values would decide – say, if I value my comfort in the morning more I’d go for Job B, if I have to pay the mortgage or want to save for something I’d go for job A. Say I need more money, how could I reduce the negative? Perhaps by sharing a lift by car to work instead of going by bus – making the journey time shorter and comfort greater.

Still stuck? Use your intuition and bring your true unconscious motivation to the fore by the simple old remedy of deciding by tossing a coin. You’ll soon know what you really want when you feel happy or disappointed by the result.

HOWEVER – be careful to examine the emotions that arise. Are you secretly wanting to do something you know on another level would not work out well for you?

Pay attention to your intuition

When I ask clients to go back and recall what happened when they decided to go into a job / relationship or whatever, that they later regretted, they all admit the same thing: They had some feeling or intuition that warned them that all was not well – but they chose to ignore it and go ahead anyway. If this applies to you, next time, follow your intuition!

Other people report that an intuition came to mind ‘out of nowhere’, they acted on it and it turned out a success. Unconsciously you pick up much more information about what is going on around you than you are consciously aware of, so next time an intuition apparently pops up from nowhere – act on it and you’ll be glad you did.

©Susanna Bellini 2002

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